A quick side trip to a small crappie lake with a nice dock after work for about half an hour, and I found em about 10-12 ft deep in the dock shadow over about 15-18' of water. Then it started to rain and didn't quit as quick as I guessed and I got soaked before I wised up and headed for the car.

Bite was little more than extra pressure on the rod tip (I use a 4' ultra-micro light rod to get in close to fish the dock shadow) or the line just moving sideways. Jig head was 48th oz with a mini rattail shad in Pearl on 2# line. Pearl and white are the colors for this year so far. Our crappies seem to change their minds a bit with the beginning of every season and pick a new color yearly. I got in about half an hour of fishing for 9 small to medium city crappies, but they were starting to come quicker as I figured out the technique: that was about a 15 -20' flip along the dock, a settle for 6-8 seconds and then a slow retrieve. Bite came at the point where the jig had just stopped descending and was starting to come up. I could not coax a bite on straight vertical jigging; there had to be some lateral movement in addition to the vertical, and I got no bite that I could feel either.

I had just worked out the presentation when the sky opened up and I got soaked. Everybody else headed for the car immediately. Dumb ol me had to stick it out for two more fish, before I headed for the shelter of the nearest tree. I thought it was going to pass right over and I would have the dock to myself, but no such luck.

Nobody else on the dock was catching except the old man drop shotting a minnow to the mini-walleyes on the bottom a bit farther out. Everybody else seem to be bobbered up at about 3 or 4 ft way above the fish. They just sat, too.

That was a real nice dock too, with a decent weedline, and then it stretched out over a couple more breaks all the way out to about 25' of water. It is one of our DNR's floating docks with a solid floor; so it throws a real nice dock shadow. You can generally find crappies suspended under docks like that around here, you just gotta find how deep they are and what kind of presentation will work for them. No slabs tonight, but I didn't really want to go straight home anyway. I had a real pleasant interlude, which is what the backseat rod is for in the first place, and now I have just about dried off, too.

Good night, shift starts at 5 am tomorrow; so it is bedtime for this ol boy.